


the fucked up one

by performativezippers



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Danvers Sisters, F/F, Sanvers - Freeform, and also college, but set now, in which they meet in high school, sad angry lonely miserable lesbians, sorry sorry, the closet is a deathtrap, this one is fucked up, wtf why would you do this to us
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-16 21:32:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13644855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/performativezippers/pseuds/performativezippers
Summary: Maggie swallows. “I showed you mine,” she says softly, and Alex hates how she sounds. How lost, how confused, how worried.Alex has never, not once in over ten years, done anything but melt when she’s heard Maggie talk like that.She pulls out her own badge, somehow remembering to click it over to display the best credentials for the day. “Secret Service,” she lies.Maggie tilts her head, and Alex had almost, almost forgotten about the head tilt.“How the hell did you become secret service?” she asks, her hands on her hips.And Alex wants to say 'how the hell did you move to National City' and 'how the hell are you on my crime scene' and 'how dare you talk to me' and 'how are you feeling right now' and 'are you as fucked up right now as I am,' but she doesn’t.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is the first chapter of this multi-chapter story. the first chapter is going up today in honor of #SanversWeek day 1: alternate meeting
> 
> i'm...sorry

Alex narrows her eyes. When will the fucking local cops stop messing around at alien crime scenes? They don’t have the technology or the expertise or the containment facilities to even think about playing ball in the big leagues.

 

While Kara flits around behind her, gushing to anyone who will listen about how the President called her “Supergirl,” – which is, of course, her name – Alex strides over to kick the cops off the tarmac.

 

“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing at my crime scene?” she asks the top of this woman’s head.

 

“Anyone ever tell you all you feds sound the same?” The woman, the cop, is standing slowly, her face still looking down at the ground, her hair falling in front of her face. “It’s like you all watch the same bad movies tog—Alex?”

 

Alex immediately feels like her entire body was dunked in an ice bath.

 

“Wh-what are you doing here?” Alex hates herself for the way her voice catches. For how it trembles.

 

For how she’s trembling.

 

The cop hasn’t taken her eyes off Alex’s face. She hasn’t breathed. Her mouth is hung open. She reaches behind herself, like she’s mesmerized, and pulls out a badge.

 

“It…I’m…science division,” she manages. “NCPD.”

 

“Oh,” Alex says weakly.

 

How is this happening.

 

Maggie swallows. “I showed you mine,” she says softly, and Alex hates how she sounds. How lost, how confused, how worried.

 

Alex has never, not once in over ten years, done anything but melt when she’s heard Maggie talk like that.

 

She pulls out her own badge, somehow remembering to click it over to display the best credentials for the day.

 

“Secret Service,” she lies.

 

Maggie tilts her head, and Alex had almost, _almost_ forgotten about the head tilt.

 

“How the hell did you become secret service?” she asks, her hands on her hips.

 

And Alex wants to say _how the hell did you move to National City_ and _how the hell are you on my crime scene_ and _how dare you talk to me_ and _how are you feeling right now_ and _are you as fucked up right now as I am_ , but she doesn’t.

 

“I’m sure you mean well, Detective,” she says, nearly stuttering at the opportunity to say her name. “But this is a federal crime scene.” And she wants to say that Maggie is contaminating it, but that word has some weight between them, so she just presses her lips together and tries to seem cool and professional.

 

“The airport’s within my jurisdiction,” Maggie tells her, standing tall and looking right into her eyes.

 

Alex can barely even look in her direction, but she finds herself saying something that maybe she should have said years ago. “Your jurisdiction ends where I say it does.” She doesn’t mean to but she nearly spits it, and Maggie recoils.

 

“Really, Alex?” she asks, finally dropping the pretense that this is just a professional disagreement. “That’s really what you have to say to me?”

 

And Alex doesn’t know if she should say _I have **nothing** to say to you_ or if she should make pointed comment about Maggie always having to have the last word.

 

“You can’t be here, Maggie,” she finally says, and it has a heaviness to it that has nothing to do with the President or the escaped Kryptonian or jurisdictional disputes.

 

And Maggie just shakes her head as she backs away. “Fine, Agent Danvers. Just, fine.”

 

Alex just stands there, breathing, for as long as she can.

 

That didn’t just happen.

 

That couldn’t have just happened.

 

* * *

 

It’s Kara, of course, who notices her there, just standing, staring down at the scorch marks on the carpet.

 

“Who was that?” she asks, her voice still peppy and happy after her conversation with the President.

 

“Detective,” Alex grunts out.

 

“You okay?”

 

And Alex isn’t good at keeping secrets from Kara, so she tells her. “It was Maggie Sawyer.”

 

Kara crinkles, clearly trying to place the name. “Wait, Maggie Sawyer. Wasn’t she…wasn’t she your friend from that science camp in high school?”

 

“Yeah,” Alex says haltingly. “She was.”

 

But she was so much more than that.

 

* * *

 

They’d both gone to that camp – the camp for high school girls who excelled in science – two years in a row. Their first summer, the one before their junior year of high school, they were assigned to be roommates. And Maggie had a lot of walls up, and was pretty guarded, but Alex somehow broke them down. About three weeks into the four-week camp, Maggie confided in Alex, slowly and haltingly, that she was gay.

 

Alex just hugged her and told her that didn’t change anything for Alex, and that she was glad Maggie had told her.

 

Maggie cried in her arms.

 

They stayed in touch all year, and Alex realized, slowly, that no one else in Maggie’s life seemed to have taken the supportive hugging route, opting instead for the destructive homophobic one.

 

But it wasn’t until Maggie called her on Valentine’s Day, sobbing, and told Alex, haltingly, through her wracking breaths, what that day was the anniversary of, that Alex fully understood.

 

She immediately told Maggie that she was saving up for a plane ticket, that she was coming to Nebraska to see her, but Maggie told her not to come. “Just,” she sniffled, “at camp, this year, when you see me, could you maybe just give me a really big hug?”

 

And, that next summer, Alex did. The biggest hug.

 

But by the end of the first week, hugs weren’t doing it anymore.

 

Alex kissed her.

 

And Maggie kissed her back. Again and again.

 

They went slow, for people sharing a bedroom who are about to be seniors in high school and who only have a month together. So they didn’t sleep together for an entire week.

 

And then they spent the last two weeks of camp doing nothing _but_ sleeping together.

 

They were each other’s first.

 

And Maggie assumed they were going to stay together during the year. They were both applying to college, and while Maggie’s choice was going to be limited by who gave her scholarships, she was applying to a lot of California schools. It could work.

 

And Alex said yes, but she didn’t fully understand what she was agreeing to. That it would mean telling her mom, and Kara, and Vicky, and the other people at school.

 

That it might mean people would think she was gay.

 

Alex wasn’t gay. She was just kind of with Maggie, in a way that wasn’t _super_ different from how she was with Vicky. Just a little more physical.

 

So Alex didn’t tell anyone.

 

She put a picture of Maggie up in her locker. Some guy, one of the dumb jocks that Vicky was friends with, made a joke the first month of school, calling the picture “Alex’s girlfriend.”

 

And Vicky had hissed at Alex to take it down, said it made her look like a lesbian and Kyle Madden wouldn’t ask her out if she looked like a lesbian.

 

And Alex’s mom was obsessed with Kyle Madden and Alex hadn’t made her mom happy or proud of her since before her dad had died.

 

So Alex told Maggie about what happened, and said that she still liked her and wanted to keep doing what they were doing, but if Kyle asked her out she would say yes.

 

Maggie hung up on her, and didn’t answer any of her calls or emails or letters or postcards.

 

Alex told Vicky, haltingly, that she and Maggie had slept together, but Vicky just brushed it off. “That’s just practicing,” she said. “Something girls do when boys aren’t around.”

 

And it didn’t quite feel like that, but Alex didn’t push it.

 

So when she was going to have sex with Kyle for the first time, in the spring of her senior year, and he asked her if she was a virgin, she said yes, even though it felt a little bit like a lie.

 

* * *

 

“And wait,” Kara says, still crinkling, shading her eyes from the sun beating down the tarmac. “Didn’t she go to Stanford, too?”

 

Alex nods. “Yeah,” she says and she hopes Kara can’t hear how thick her voice is. “She did.”

 

* * *

 

Maggie didn’t speak to Alex again, after that call about Kyle. Never answered a text or call or email. Alex wondered about her, all the time. How she was surviving senior year, if her family had come around, where she was going to college.

 

But that didn’t prepare her for seeing Maggie in the back of her bio lecture her freshman fall at Stanford.

 

And even that didn’t prepare her for seeing Maggie, drunk and dancing on some girl, at a party that first October.

 

And even that didn’t prepare her for running into Maggie at the gym late one night that November. They didn’t talk about what had happened. They didn’t talk about their past. But Maggie pushed Alex up against the free weights and kissed her, and Alex took her back to her dorm room and they fucked.

 

Those whole first two years, Maggie dated. Maggie was always with someone, always with some good looking girl or another. And Alex dated too, sometimes. Not as seriously, not as consistently, and never women, but she dated too.

 

But the people they were dating never mattered, not when they were alone together. Not when they were drunk, or angry, or tired, or frustrated, or upset, or proud, or bored, or happy.

 

Maggie was always dating someone, but she never said no to Alex, not once.

 

Maggie cheated on every single person she dated those first two years.

 

And Alex still just considered it something girls did when boys weren’t around. And she took that “not around” pretty liberally – Alex was pretty and hot and always surrounded by boys in her science classes, and it wouldn’t have been hard to find a boy to date or fuck any day of the week, if she’d wanted to. But sometimes she just didn’t feel like putting in the work to meet someone new, or deal with someone who was nervous or fumbling in bed, or make it awkward in the lab the next day.

 

And sometimes she just wanted Maggie.

 

But she wasn’t gay.

 

No one knew. Because Alex wasn’t gay and Maggie was ashamed of cheating.

 

Kara didn’t know. Maggie’s friends and teammates didn’t know. Maggie’s girlfriends didn’t know.

 

They never talked about it. They didn’t really hang out, otherwise.

 

Alex would just text, or call, or come by. It was almost always Alex who would initiate. There were a couple of memorable occasions where Maggie had, but almost all of the time, it was Alex. Alex would call or text or come by, and they would fuck, and then, at some point, she’d leave.

 

Maggie never once, not ever, during those two years, turned her away.

 

* * *

 

When Alex came back to campus for her third year, Maggie was waiting in her apartment. “I’m seeing someone,” Maggie told her. “It started over the summer, while we were both doing research. It’s serious. I really like her. I’m not going to cheat on her with you.”

 

Alex just nodded. She tried not to notice anything she was feeling.

 

“I need you,” Maggie said, hesitant and scared and tender, “I need you to not come around, not like you do. I’ve never been able to turn you down, but I don’t want to cheat on Emily. Please, don’t ask me to, okay?”

 

And Alex understood exactly, because she’d never been able to say no to Maggie, not when Maggie was looking like this, soft and vulnerable and not loved nearly enough.

 

“Okay,” Alex said. “Okay, I promise.”

 

And she kept her promise. She kept showing up, but with coffee and study materials and donuts.

 

They, somehow, despite the history, despite their completely fucked up past, became friends.

 

Maggie became the best friend Alex had ever had.

  
And Alex never tempted her, never made a single move, never raised so much as a suggestive eyebrow. And Emily didn’t know about their past but she had no reason to suspect. Alex was straight, and focused on her schoolwork, and always went to bed early.

 

* * *

 

Alex graduated the year before Maggie, finishing undergrad in just three years, but stayed at Stanford to start her joint MD/PhD, so she was still around for Maggie’s last year. Maggie didn’t have anyone to use her graduation tickets, so she gave all four of them to Emily, for her large family, until Alex, shyly, asked if she could have one.

 

Maggie cried in her arms, that night. Alex remembered the night Maggie came out to her, in what felt like another universe, on a different narrow twin bed in the middle of a different night. How Maggie had cried in her arms that night, too, and none of the nights between.

 

Alex screamed herself hoarse when it was Maggie’s turn to walk across the stage.

 

After graduation they hugged, hard, and promised to stay in touch even though Maggie and Emily were moving to Gotham.

 

They tried, they really did, but it was hard.

 

Skype barely worked, and phone calls were hard to schedule around their really different lives. Alex was basically living in the lab and Maggie was basically living in the academy, but they made it work, somehow.

 

Maggie was still, even those years when they only saw each other about once a month through the scratchy internet, the best friend Alex had ever had. Alex didn’t like to talk about herself, and Maggie was worse, but they shared what they could.

 

They shared more with each other than with anyone else in their lives. Maggie was the person Alex would text or call when an experiment wasn’t working, or when she was getting published, or when her mom was being particularly horrible, or Kara was being particularly perfect.

 

And Alex loved being the person Maggie would text when she was bored or exhausted or frustrated at work, or when Emily had dragged her out shopping and she was going on hour four of sitting outside dressing rooms and doling out compliments at regular intervals.

 

Alex had never had a friend like her before, not really.

 

They’d promised to visit each other, but they just couldn’t make the timing work. Palo Alto to Gotham was a long flight, and an expensive one, and they were both just as strapped for time as they were for cash. So they didn’t see each other for almost three years after Maggie’s graduation.

 

Until one night, Maggie called Alex, upset.

 

“Emily and I might be breaking up,” she said, and she wasn’t crying but she was close. “I don’t know what went wrong and I don’t know how to fix it.”

 

Alex bought a plane ticket and came out to Gotham to see her.

 

And Maggie and Emily hadn’t broken up but things had been going badly for a long time. And Alex’s wasn’t on academic probation but she was close and things had been going badly for a long time.

 

That second night, in Alex’s hotel room, they fucked for the first time in five years.

 

And afterwards, in a blind panic, consumed with guilt and the feeling that her life was completely in shambles, Maggie turned on her. Yelled at her. Screamed at her for ruining her relationship with Emily. For seducing her, for fucking up her plan and her sense of who she was and her entire fucking life.

 

And Alex understood that what they’d just done was horrible and that she certainly had a big chunk of responsibility for what just happened. But her life was in agony too, and this wasn’t just on her, and she’d stayed away for years and she hadn’t realized how inevitable it all felt.

 

And she cried and Maggie didn’t care, didn’t stop yelling at her. Didn’t stop blaming her for the destruction of her entire five-year relationship, for the destruction of her entire life.

 

Didn’t stop saying that she hated her, that she never wanted to see her again. That Alex had never done anything but ruin her life. That Alex was a heartless monster.

 

So Alex just gathered her clothes and got dressed and left her hotel room – _her_ hotel room – and never spoke to Maggie again.

 

Her best friend.


	2. Chapter 2

Of course, it doesn’t end on the tarmac. Maggie is there, at the abandoned warehouse, and she clocks Alex as DEO the second she sees her, and Alex just seethes.

 

She has to report it to J’onn, and she does so with the hope that J’onn can get Maggie transferred to Siberia or Akron or some other place that is distinctly Not Where Alex Is. But, instead, he insists on bringing Maggie into the DEO to be their official NCPD liaison. “We could use someone that quick,” he says, “with that knowledge of the alien community,” like it’s a totally fine and normal thing to suggest.

 

Alex forces Vasquez be the one to make the call.

 

She hopes Maggie will do the logical thing and say no. But Maggie says yes, and all the sudden Alex is at home, and it’s seven in the morning, and she’s freaking out over what to wear to work. And she has a uniform – she wears the same thing to work every single fucking day – but she’s still losing her shit over it. Does she look better in the polo or the long-sleeve? Thigh holsters: bulky or impressive? Hair: curled or straight?

 

Fuck.

 

It’s been just a few days, and Maggie is fucking her up more than ever.

 

 _Fuck_.

 

* * *

 

Alex hopes that having Maggie in the DEO will be chill and much less of a big deal than Alex had been thinking. Anti-climactic. But it’s not. It’s fucking horrible.

 

Maggie is everywhere – Alex can’t even go to the fucking bathroom without seeing her, and she hasn’t stopped smirking and glaring and being infuriatingly five steps ahead for a single second, and Alex wants nothing more than to scream.

 

They end up in a heated argument in front of everyone – Maggie insisting that Alex turn the rogue Daxamite over to the NCPD for a fair trial, and Alex demanding that Maggie yield to her federal jurisdiction. It’s messy, and it’s clearly personal, and everything that Alex has ever wanted to scream at Maggie is coming through loud and clear. Alex is saying “you don’t have jurisdiction here” but they both hear _you don’t get to control my life anymore_ and Maggie is saying “you aren’t exempt from due process” but they both hear _you’ve never been anything but a rule breaker and that’s never meant anything but pain_ and Alex says something about an easy-bake oven and they both hear _you’re not enough for me_ , and Maggie threatens to work the case alone and they both know she means _I’m better off without you_.

 

It’s messy, and it’s unprofessional, and it’s horrible. And the last thing Maggie had ever said to Alex was that Alex ruined her life and Maggie never wanted to see her again, and honestly that memory is better than this one. When they’re both fully adults and both armed and both jaded and both lashing out with everything they have.

 

The fight only ends when Supergirl pulls Alex back out into the field with her. Alex turns on her heel and stalks away, and she doesn’t put on a vest, and Maggie wonders if she’s going to die out in the field, and the last thing Maggie’s ever said to her will be an insult about her obvious and long-standing lack of morality.

 

But then someone is coming up to Maggie and clasping her shoulder and insisting that Maggie come out with them for a drink. And Maggie certainly doesn’t need a drink right now, and she definitely doesn’t need one with another fucking DEO agent, but somehow her protests are ignored, and she finds herself out at a dingy dive bar with none other than Lucy Lane, Co-Assistant Director of the DEO and sister of the one and only Lois Lane.

 

“So,” Lucy drawls, after two whiskeys have been ordered and chugged, and a third is on its way. “What’s the deal with you and Alex?”

 

Maggie just shakes her head. She’s not drunk but she’s tipsy, but even blackout and off her face, she’d never out someone. Not even Alex.

 

“No deal.”

 

Lucy just rolls her eyes, though. “Seriously, Sawyer, I need to know. And don’t worry about spilling her gay secrets, or whatever. It’s obvious that you two slept together. What I mean is, who didn’t call who back?”

 

Maggie gapes for a long moment before Lucy just laughs. “Oh, honey. It’s _beyond_ obvious, actually. But, don’t worry. I’m bi, so we’re all family here, and I swear I won’t say a word. Come on. Spill.”

 

“It’s not my story to tell,” Maggie protests, but it sounds weak even to her.

 

Lucy just seems to take that as a challenge. She leans across the table. “I think it is. I think you’ve been dying to tell someone forever.”

 

And fuck if she’s not right.

 

Maggie stares her down, taking in everything she can before leaning backward and narrowing her eyes, like she can see right through her.

 

“You’re fucked up, right?” Maggie finally asks. “Like, on the inside?”

 

Lucy cocks her head a little bit, taking Maggie in. But then her lips tilt into a sad half-smile. “Yeah,” she admits, “I guess so.”

 

Maggie nods. “Do you, uh…you know how there’s that one person in your life that you can point to, that you can say, ‘if it weren’t for them, if it weren’t for _you_ , I’d be less fucked up?’ Like, if that one person hadn’t been in your life, maybe you’d be okay?”

 

Lucy tries not to think about her dad, and Lois, and Superman. She nods quickly, because no one has ever put it like that, but it’s so obviously true. “Yeah,” she admits. “I – yeah.”

 

Maggie nods, like she knows, and Lucy spares a second to admire how good of a detective she is. They’ve only been talking for like, twenty minutes, and Maggie has her _down_.

 

“Well. Mine is Alex,” Maggie offers, her voice quiet.

 

“Shit,” Lucy breathes.

 

Maggie gives her a wry grin. “Yeah.”

 

“So, who didn’t call who back?”

 

Maggie rolls her eyes. “Which time?”

 

“Oh. _Fuck_.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Lucy flags down their waiter. “We’re gonna need more whiskey,” she tells him. “Keep ‘em coming.”

 

And Maggie tells her. “We met in high school, at science camp.” She choses to ignore Lucy’s cough of “nerds,” but it’s not like Lucy’s wrong. “We were roommates two summers in a row. We were…she was…she was my first girlfriend. My first…everything.”

 

“Wait, she was your _girlfriend_? In high school? _Jesus Christ_ , I had no idea she’d been shutting herself up in the closet by choice for so fucking long. I always figured her for an oblivious gay, not a willingly ignorant one.”

 

Maggie just shrugs. “Well, I don’t know. She agreed to be my girlfriend, and we like, slept together and everything, but when she got back to high school in the fall she was very clear with me that if a boy asked her out, she’d say yes.”

 

“Ouch.”

 

“No fucking kidding. So obviously we broke up, and I’d thought…whatever. That she was it, you know? My happiness, or some shit. It was dumb. I was young and stupid. But she broke my heart, in that stupid dramatic teenage way.”

 

Maggie’s rolling her eyes, like everything she’s saying is embarrassing. And Lucy thinks that nothing Maggie’s saying is stupid or teenage or embarrassing, but she lets her keep going.

 

“And then we both ended up at Stanford, and we…” Maggie takes a long breath. “She never left the closet, but we…”

 

Maggie trails off, but Lucy’s gotten the picture by now. “You fucked.”

 

“Yeah. We fucked. For like, two years. But I was…” Maggie heaves out a sigh, and she’s three whiskeys in, and for some reason she feels a kinship with Lucy, like they’re the same type of fucked up, and maybe Lucy, out of everyone else in the world, will understand. So she tells Lucy something she’s never told anyone else. “I was in love with her.”

 

And the world should smash apart. Every window in the bar should shatter; all the bottles along the back of the bar should explode in a shower of wet, dangerous shards. Sirens should blare, the streets should crack open, volcanoes should erupt and tectonic plates should screech and collide and crumple. The cosmos should open up and suck everything back inside of it.

 

But instead it’s just quiet. Everyone around them keeps mumbling and drinking, like Maggie Sawyer didn’t just admit the one thing that she’s never admitted. Like she didn’t just say out loud something she’s barely ever let herself think.

 

Lucy stays quiet.

 

“I was…I was in love with her, but she…she just wanted to fuck, I guess,” Maggie finally says, because that’s actually the important part. Her loving Alex is beyond impossible, beyond admission, but that’s not the story. The story is that Alex fucked her for years and never actually wanted her.

 

The story is that Maggie has never been enough for anyone, not ever. Maybe she could have been enough for Emily, but Alex had ruined that. And so Maggie is fucked up beyond repair, and it all, always, comes back to Alex.

 

“So what happened?” Lucy finally asks, her voice soft and supportive but with an edge like, if Maggie needed it, she could turn sarcastic and hard at any moment.

 

“I, um,” Maggie sighs a little. She’s three and a half whiskeys in, and she’s already admitted the biggest thing in her life – she loves and is not loved back, not ever – so she doesn’t have anything to hide anymore. “Those years, while we fucked, and I loved her…I was dating other people. But I…when Alex showed up, I let it happen, every time. I cheated, every time.”

 

“Fuck,” Lucy breathes out, and Maggie can tell it’s the pattern and the history that’s made her say it, not the fact that Maggie’s a cheater, and Maggie appreciates it. She _is_ a fucking cheater, and she has been since she was eighteen years old.

 

You’d think she’d be used to it by now.

 

“But so then I met this girl, and I liked her. Emily.” She rolls her eyes at herself. “I decided to really be with her, to try to stop loving Alex, you know, because she’d never love me back. So I was like, really _with_ Emily.”

 

“What did Alex do?”

 

And it’s all Maggie can do to not cry, because this is the part that hurts the most. This is the part that still, so many years later, makes her confused. Because if Alex had just wanted to fuck her, if Alex had kept being someone who just wanted Maggie for her body, then it would be easy to hate her, to dismiss her, to say _well she didn’t deserve me or want me anyway_. It would have been easier to move on, to be less fucked up by her. But the truth is so much worse.

 

“She became my best friend.”

 

And those words, those five words are so innocent, but Lucy seems to appreciate what that means. “ _Fuck_ ,” is all Lucy says, but Maggie hears everything she’s thinking. _Fuck_ , that’s complicated. And _fuck_ , so she did love you, in her own way. And _fuck_ , now you hate each other so clearly something horrible happened. And _fuck_ , Alex hasn’t ever mentioned you, and _fuck_ , this story clearly doesn’t end well but the stakes just got so much higher.

 

“Yeah,” Maggie says, chuckling a little bit, staring into her fourth whiskey. “She became my best friend, and I’d never…I’d never had a friend like her, ever.” Because she hadn’t. Because Eliza Wilke had turned her back, and no one in high school had stepped up, and she’d been so busy with girlfriends and Alex in her first two years of college that she’d never found anyone to be a friend like that.

 

Alex’s friendship had, for the very first time since she was fourteen, made her feel valuable. Made her feel worthy of love, of being cared about. Made her feel like she deserved to be important to someone, even when sex wasn’t part of the equation. Her first two years at Stanford had proved to her that she was hot, that girls wanted her, but she’d never felt seen and loved for who she was, not just how she looked, until Alex became her best friend.

 

Being in love with Alex, and fucking Alex, was just impossible not to do. It didn’t make her feel good, particularly, but she just had to do it. But being loved by Alex, being Alex’s best friend? That had made her feel more whole than she ever had, in her entire life.

 

And then it all fucking shattered.

 

Lucy leans forward, tilting her fourth whiskey towards Maggie. “So,” she asks, “finish your drink, and tell me who fucked whose girlfriend.”

 

Maggie toys with her drink, narrowing her eyes for a second as she figures out how to answer Lucy’s question. “I guess, uh…well, I guess, _technically_ , Alex fucked Emily’s girlfriend.”

 

Lucy knits her eyebrows for a second before she gets it, and then she lets out a puff of air. “Fuck,” she says again.

 

Maggie tosses back her fourth whiskey. “Yup,” she says, grimacing as it slides down. “I was with Emily for five years, and in one night, it all just…fuck. Destroyed.”

 

Lucy flags the waiter down, and they’re quiet until they’re holding their fifth whiskeys.

 

“You cheated,” Lucy says, and Maggie would usually punch someone for saying it like that (truthfully), but when Lucy says it, it just seems like a fact, not a judgment.

 

“Yeah. I cheated. Things were…Emily and I were almost over, and Alex came to see me because I was fucked up about it, and then she…” Maggie takes a drink, and she sighs, and she says it. “She fucked me, and I…it just ruined my life, you know, because Emily and I were together for so fucking long. And it was…it was bad.” She shakes her head a little bit. There are a lot of nights in her life that she wishes she could erase from her memory, and that night is vying for the number one spot. “I lost both of them.”

 

It’s silent for a second, and Maggie sort of can’t believe that she says it.

 

“Everyone who had ever loved me, I lost that night.”

 

“And Alex?”

 

Maggie’s head snaps up. Lucy is nudging whiskey number six over to her, her face innocent.

 

“What about Alex?”

 

“She lost you, too, right? Her best friend?”

 

But Maggie just scoffs. “She got exactly what she wanted from me, that night.”

 

But Lucy is frowning, and she’s shaking her head, and she wasn’t there, but she clearly doesn’t believe Maggie.

 

“I doubt that’s true.”

 

But now Maggie is almost six entire whiskeys in, and that night was the second to ruin her entire life, to make her start from nothing, to smash her down to the ground. To make her hate herself with a constant, horrible, untameable heat, like a wildfire in an endless dry forest.

 

“Fuck you,” she says, and she means it to be hard and serious and biting, but she’s six whiskeys in, and she’s never told anyone that she loved Alex before, and she’s never told anyone since that night that Alex was her best friend, that Alex was her entire life.

 

That everything good that had ever happened to her since she was fourteen had happened because of Alex.

 

That everything bad that happened to her since she was seventeen could be traced to Alex.

 

But so she says “fuck you,” and she means it hateful and sharp, but it comes out hurt and tired. And Lucy is too smart to have missed it.

 

“I doubt Alex wanted to lose her best friend,” Lucy says, and her voice is soft but her eyes are full of challenge. “Even if she did want to fuck.”

 

But Maggie shakes her head. “She never needed me. Not like I needed her. She always had other people.”

 

“Like you had Emily?”

 

And Maggie remembers, for the first time tonight, that Lucy’s trained as a lawyer. That Lucy’s job is to trip people up.

 

But she’s clearly not a very _good_ lawyer, because Alex had her sister, and her other friends, and her stupid high school boyfriend, and her brilliance, and her professors, and her degree, and her parents. And Maggie only ever had Alex.

 

“You know, I’ve known Alex for a couple of years now, and I’ve never seen her make a single friend, or date, or sleep with anyone. Ever.”

 

Maggie doesn’t say anything, because she doesn’t know how to possibly respond to that.

 

“I think you should consider the fact that, maybe, you had Emily, and you had your other girlfriends, and Alex only ever had you.” Lucy pauses for a second, finishing her sixth whiskey. “And, maybe, that night, Alex lost everything she’d ever had, too.”


	3. Chapter 3

Things don’t get better, at work. The chat with Lucy did nothing but churn up shit that Maggie had long since buried, and Maggie comes in the next day hungover and pissed off, and she snaps at Alex for no reason three times, and Alex rises to occasion and snaps back, hard and bitter and cruel.

 

And J’onn has to pull Alex aside, Lucy as his witness, and tell her, in no uncertain terms, that if she and Detective Sawyer can’t make it work, they’ll both be removed from the task force.

 

And he walks out, and Lucy turns to Alex with a stone face, and says, “Fix this, Danvers,” in a tone like it’s a command. And they’re the same rank, they’re Co-Assistant Directors together, but Alex understands.

 

So she curses and grumbles and spends many hours punching the shit out of a heavy bag and out of her sister and out of Lucy and out of a couple of poor rookies who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she shoots the hell out of an alien who makes the mistake of rampaging through National City that afternoon.

 

But then she takes a shower and lets the blood run off her knuckles and her ribs, and she gets dressed, and she gets on her bike, and she drives to Maggie’s apartment, and she sets her feet and she knocks on the door.

 

Maggie opens the door, and Alex talks before Maggie has the chance to say anything that will piss her off. “If we can’t be civil at work, you’re going to be booted from the taskforce.”

 

And that shuts Maggie up for long enough for Alex to get one more sentence in. “I mean, we’ll both be booted, but it won’t matter as much for _my_ career.”

 

“If I get booted, I’ll be demoted,” Maggie says, her voice a little dull with the realization.

 

Alex nods, because that’s why she’s here. “Look, I know you hate me and shit, but I’m not trying to get your badge taken away.”

 

And Maggie should say _I don’t hate you_ , but she does hate her, in a lot of ways. So she says nothing.

 

There’s a long, very awkward pause. Alex finally breaks it, huffing out a frustrated breath. “Look, I’m not trying to destroy your life, okay?”

 

“Well that’s a first,” Maggie mumbles, but she doesn’t quite realize she’s said it out loud until she hears Alex make a little sound. Something between a breath and a gasp, not unlike the sound the Astra had made when Alex had slid her sword between her ribs.

 

Alex holds out a finger, pointing at Maggie, and her hand is trembling and her voice is trembling but she also seems impossibly strong, standing tall in the hallway like she owns it. “I _never_ wanted to destroy your life, Maggie, not _ever_ , and if that’s what you think, then you’re a fucking idiot.”

 

“Fuck you, Alex,” Maggie says, and in a way it’s overdue and in a way it feels abjectly horrible coming out of her mouth. “You destroyed every relationship I’ve ever had. You fucking destroyed my life, over and over again. And yeah, maybe I’m an idiot for letting you do it, but I’m not an idiot for finally seeing it.”

 

“No,” Alex says, her whole body burning, and her eyes are wet but she’s furious. “No, fuck _you_. Fuck you, for putting all of this on me, for blaming me for everything, for a fucking decade. Everything that ever happened between us, it was _both_ of us. We were both in that bed that night, Maggie. I _never_ forced you to do any of it, not _ever_. How fucking dare you accuse me of that.”

 

And Alex is still in the hallway, and Maggie’s still only in her socks, but Maggie can’t stop herself. “You broke up the longest relationship I’ve ever had.”

 

And Alex takes a step forward then, and she’s so fucking close, and Maggie can smell her and she’s pretty sure she can feel the heat rolling off her skin. “You were my best friend,” Alex spits, and she’s absolutely snarling, but somehow she’s also more soft and vulnerable and open than Maggie’s ever seen her. “You were my _best friend_ , and if you think for one fucking second that I came to Gotham to purposefully destroy your relationship, and ruin your life, then you’re more of an asshole than I’d ever thought.”

 

And Maggie is shaking and so full of something that she hopes is hate, but Alex just keeps going.

 

“I _loved_ you. You were the best part of my life, for so long, and if you think that little of me, that I _wanted_ to hurt you, that I was _that_ fucking selfish, then I wish I’d never fucking wasted my time on you. Then you obviously never actually knew me at all.”

 

Alex takes a step back then, and she almost turns, like she’s going to leave, but she has one more thing to say.

 

“You destroyed me, that night, Maggie, you were fucking _horrible_ to me, and I’m still here, taking hits for you, so you can keep your job. Fucking think about that.”

 

And Alex turns and she leaves, and the door to the stairwell slams shut behind her. And they both cry that night, alone on their couches, remembering what it had felt like to be loved. What it had felt like to believe that love would always be there.

 

* * *

 

Supergirl gets hurt in the field. She gets hurt, and she blows out her powers, and Alex goes ballistic. She kills three humans on the spot, humans with weapons that glow green, and they only manage to bring in the other four alive because J’onn grabs Alex and hauls her into the van with Supergirl’s unconscious body.

 

Maggie finds them both in the medbay at the DEO. Supergirl is awake, but clearly groggy. She’s lying underneath what Maggie knows are sunlamps, and the yellow light makes Maggie’s eyes water. Alex is sitting next to Supergirl, holding her hand, and reading a book out loud.

 

Maggie lingers, unnoticed, for long enough to realize that it’s _A Wrinkle in Time_.

 

Supergirl coughs, and Maggie watches Alex clean off her chin, her face tender and her hand shaking uncontrollably.

 

Maggie’s all the way over in the doorway, but she can tell that Supergirl is coughing up blood.

 

“It’s okay, Kara,” Alex says softly. “It’s okay, I’m here.”

 

And the realization that Supergirl is Kara – that Alex’s weird little sister is _Supergirl_ – slots into place inside Maggie’s body, like it was a chink in her field of vision that she’d never noticed was missing.

 

Alex’s sister is _Supergirl_. For the entire time that Maggie has known her, Alex’s little sister has been an alien. Alex has always, for the entire time Maggie’s known her, had a terrible secret to keep. Every second that Maggie’s been around Alex, she’s been protecting someone else.

 

Maggie remembers what Alex would say, sometimes, about never measuring up. About always being second best. About how everything in her life had changed when Kara had shown up. About how her mom was always on her to be a better sister, to spend more time on Kara and less on herself.

 

About how any time Alex ever did anything for herself, she’d feel guilty.

 

And she remembers how Alex had never invited Maggie to Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter with her family, even though she’d known Maggie didn’t have any family of her own.

 

And Maggie had completely missed it. Maggie had _known_ Kara – had known her well, those couple of years, because Maggie had sometimes jumped in front of the camera when Kara and Alex skyped, and she’d hung out with Kara whenever she’d come to visit Alex at Stanford, and Alex’d had a terrible habit of putting Kara on speakerphone while she and Maggie studied together or while she mindlessly braided and unbraided Maggie’s hair. And that whole time Maggie had missed that Kara was an alien.

 

That Kara’s cousin, the cousin Alex would talk about with hate and jealousy in her voice, was fucking _Superman_.

  
Maggie had completely missed it.  
  


And Maggie, standing in the hallway, staring into the intimate scene in the medbay, watching Supergirl cough up blood into her sister’s hand, wonders what else she’s missed.

 

* * *

 

Maggie’s been chasing down a lead on a big case: a weapon and drug smuggling case that’s left three innocent people dead – two human and one alien – and six more with inoperable damage.

 

Maggie’s been insisting, for days, that they raid this warehouse. And Alex, her co-lead on the mission, has been insisting, for days, that they need more intel. Every day, for the past three days, Maggie has insisted that the smugglers are about to change bases, leaving this warehouse and going back underground. This is their only chance. And every day, for the past three days, Alex has shaken her head, and insisted that they can’t justify a raid without more information on the weapons and technology inside that warehouse. That until they can plant bugs, turn an informant, or capture a member of the team, it’s too dangerous.

 

Supergirl can’t see inside the building, Alex has insisted over and over again, which means they’re prepared for her, which makes it too dangerous to send any of them. Including her.

 

And Maggie now knows why Alex is overprotective of the Girl of Steel, but this is her job, and she’s not going to keep letting innocent people die.

 

So Maggie does what she always does.

 

She goes alone. She’s never been good with partners, anyway.

 

She suits up, and she helps herself to the weapons and gear in the DEO armory, and she gets on her bike, and she goes to the warehouse herself. She means to do recon, to get a sense of movements in and out, to sneak inside and catch a glimpse of their operations. She pictures herself returning, triumphant, to the DEO, waving around the crucial piece of evidence in front of the black-ops feds who were too chicken-shit to back her move.

 

But it doesn’t quite work out that way.

  
They have something patrolling the perimeter, and Maggie is never clear if it’s an animal or a machine or a modified person or what, but it attacks her within seconds of her arrival in the humid darkness of the courtyard surrounding the warehouse.

 

It attacks her, and she shoots at it, but her bullets don’t slow it down at all.

 

She can’t say the same for the bullets that come out of the darkness, slamming, _one, two, three_ , into her vest.

 

She doesn’t think any of them penetrated the vest, but she goes down anyway, her breath gone and her chest exploding with pain and her head hitting on the concrete with a sickening smack.

 

The thing drags her inside, its teeth ripping off a big piece of her vest like it’s made of spun sugar, just to show her that those first shots were clearly only a warning.

 

If they want to hurt her, the bite says, they can. And they will.

 

And Maggie is just resigning herself to her untimely death when all of the doors explode inwards, and there’s smoke and light and screams, and the DEO is pouring inside the building. Supergirl is there, up in the air, taking out combatants with her breath and her eyes and, with great swooping motions down to the ground, sometimes with her fists. The men are shooting at Supergirl with weapons that glow green, and Maggie knows enough by now to realize those can hurt her. Kill her.

 

Soldiers are fanning out, calling back and forth, and the metal walls of the warehouse are making everything a thousand times louder.

 

Maggie tries to sit up, but her chest is nearly collapsed with pain, and her left arm seems genuinely injured, and her head is swimming.

 

And, just then, something grabs hold of her right arm and drags her, in a show of inhuman strength, behind a set of boxes in a corner.

 

The explosion that demolishes the concrete where she had just been lights up Alex’s face as Alex finishes pulling her to safety, her face set and furious.

 

“Stay there,” she barks, before rolling out from behind the boxes to set up just a few feet away, behind a much smaller and flimsier stack of things. She pulls her rifle around from behind her body, braces, and starts firing.

 

The enemy – whoever they are, seems to realize that Alex is a threat, and maybe that Maggie is there too, so they start to converge on the corner.

 

Alex doesn’t panic, she doesn’t even spare a glance in Maggie’s direction. She just fires, quick and methodical and deadly.

 

The rest of her team slowly converge, eventually trapping their assailants in a ring between themselves and Alex’s lethal gun.

 

Supergirl drops down and freezes all of the enemy weapons with one enormous breath, and it’s over. Alex sags, just for a second, against her makeshift blockade, before she straightens, slings her rifle over her shoulder, and strides out to take command of the clean up.

 

She doesn’t look back.

 

It’s Supergirl who flies over to Maggie, sliding her arms under Maggie’s body to fly with her, gently and carefully, out of the warehouse and into the waiting DEO ambulance.

 

* * *

 

Maggie’s lucky, the DEO doctors tell her, that she doesn’t have a collapsed lung or dangerous internal bleeding. Maggie hadn’t known there were acceptable levels of internal bleeding, but apparently this particular medical team expects a pretty high level of _just-let-me-back-in-the-field-and-I’ll-be-fine_ from the agents they oversee.

 

So they stitch her up, tell her not to operate any heavy machinery, give her the good pain meds that’ll start working when the numbness wears off, and they send her on her way.

 

She can’t help but notice that, in the next room over, the surgeon has her hands deep in the chest cavity of one of the agents.

 

She has her jacket on over just her tank top – her long sleeved shirt, bloodied and battered, is in one of the biohazard trash cans – and she’s walking through the ops center on her way out of the building when Alex’s voice stops her.

 

“What the fuck was that, Sawyer?”

 

Maggie lets out a breath, wishing they could do this later when her head isn’t throbbing so badly and her entire torso isn’t seizing up.

 

But she turns on her heel and she faces down Alex Danvers, who is pale and favoring her right ankle and, judging from the pinch of her mouth and the tightness behind her eyes, is absolutely furious.

 

And, if she weren’t so mad, if this weren’t Alex Danvers, if everything happening weren’t so twisted up in hate and fear and the terrible feelings of abandonment and betrayal, she’d be the first to admit she was wrong.

 

That agent is open from sternum to pelvis and he might not survive and he came into that warehouse to save Maggie’s ass. He was there because of her.

 

But everything that’s happening is twisted up and horrible and this was just yet another time that Alex didn’t fucking listen to her.

 

“If you had just listened to me,” Maggie hears herself snapping, “we could have gone in stronger.”

 

And Alex’s eyebrows shoot up at that, and her jaw drops, and she was clearly not expecting Maggie to be defending that fucking idiotic thing she just did.

 

“And if you had just listened to _me_ , Jacobson would be home right now with his newborn baby. But you didn’t, so I just got off the phone with his fucking wife, who just kept saying, _but he survived Iraq, he can’t die in California_ , over and over again.” Alex is shaking, and she clearly fucked up her ankle, and Maggie wonders how many of those people she shot today are dead.

 

“You violated my orders, and you put his life in jeopardy.” She gestures behind her, her arm taking in every black-clad person in the building. “You put all of our lives in jeopardy.”

 

“You should have trusted me,” Maggie insists. “I was _right_ , about what was in there, and they _were_ about to move, just like I said. We would have lost them.”

 

But her argument doesn’t seem to be impacting Alex at all. It just rolls off her, and Alex is advancing now, with a hitched gait that makes Maggie’s ankle throb in sympathy.

 

Maggie had sprained her ankle her junior spring, and she’d hated her crutches, and Alex had carried Maggie around on her back for days so Maggie could get to class on time.

 

“There are acceptable losses and there are unacceptable ones,” Alex snarls. “Losing the warehouse was tactically acceptable. Losing agents and operatives on a blind raid is unacceptable. It’s _horrifically_ stupid.”

 

And Maggie is hurting, so badly, and she knows that Alex is sort of right, but she also knows that the city is safer now because of what she did, and Alex isn’t even meeting her part way. Once again, what Maggie thinks, what she knows, what she needs, doesn’t fucking matter at all.

 

So she just leans in, stepping closer, and shoving a finger up in Alex’s face and struggling to take in air. “Well, if it was so _horrifically stupid_ , why the hell did you come after me? Why didn’t you just let me die there? Huh? I mean, haven’t I always been an acceptable loss to you, Alex?”

 

And Maggie thinks that sums it up pretty well, Alex has always been willing to lose her, but her words echo in the now-silent cavern of a room, and Alex’s breath – sharp and fast and hurt – is so loud. And when Alex opens her mouth, her words come out harsh and biting.

 

“Do you hate me _that_ fucking much, Maggie? That you’re trying to make me bury you?”

 

There’s a loud, ringing silence, as Alex’s words bounce off the wall.

 

Maggie’s head throbs, and Alex is standing stock straight on both of her feet, and her ankle is surely screaming.

 

But Alex just keeps going, and her voice is getting thick now, like she’s trying not to cry, and she’s spitting the words out as fast as she can, and it _hurts_.

 

“Is that what this is? The ultimate punishment, for how horrible I am, that I have to pick out your fucking coffin? That I have to call your fucking Tía and tell her that I killed you? Huh?” Her voice cracks, but she doesn’t stop, not for an instant. “You hate me _that_ much, that you want me spend the rest of my life knowing that I’m the reason you’re dead? Knowing that I killed you? That if we’d never met, you’d still be alive? Is that what you fucking _want_?”

 

“Alex,” Maggie says, and her brain is going in slow motion and the painkillers have definitely started to kick in because everything is a little bit foggy, but she never meant to die. She never meant for Alex to bury her. She never meant for any of this.

 

But before she can wrap her mouth around what she needs to say, Supergirl has come forward and wrapped her arms around Alex and has flown her, without pretense, out the balcony doors and into the night.

 

And Maggie is just left standing in the middle of the ops center, gaping, her chest constricting and her head pounding and blood oozing out from between her stitches.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

Maggie gets reamed out by J’onn and her captain, jointly.

 

It’s not a pleasant experience. J’onn doesn’t say anything about her unprofessional attitude at work, doesn’t mention her problems with Alex, which Maggie appreciates. Of course, going on an unsanctioned raid, alone, using DEO equipment, without backup is more than enough to get her in trouble.

 

Add to that the taxpayer dollars spent scrambling the helicopters to get the team to her, the illegality of it all, the loss of life on the other side, and the injuries to the DEO agents – Jacobson in particular – it makes a compelling case for Maggie losing her job.

 

She doesn’t lose it, in the end. But she’s put on probation and she has her firearm taken away and she’s chained to either her desk in the precinct or one at the DEO for the next four months.

 

It’s better than she deserves.

 

What she did was stupid.

 

She almost got herself killed, and she almost got Jacobson killed, and she almost got a lot of other people killed. It was stupid.

 

But what no one seems to understand is that Maggie had never expected anyone to come after her.

 

* * *

 

Maggie is halfway through trying to dress the wound on her left arm. It’s been a day and a half since the raid, and she’s supposed to change the dressing every twelve hours, but it’s ridiculously hard to do with one hand, so she hasn’t managed to do it.

 

So she’s cursing, and muttering, and using her teeth in very unhygienic ways, when she hears someone clear their throat.

 

She snaps around, terrified, and her chest screams in protest as she furiously looks around her living room for the intruder.

 

But it’s not a robber, and it’s not a murderer. It’s Supergirl.

 

Well, Kara.

 

And there had been a couple years there where Kara had felt like Maggie’s little sister too. There was that one night Kara had come to visit Stanford and she’d been a freshman at NCU, and she’d come to party with them and she’d gotten in over her head, and Alex had fallen asleep back at her apartment, dead drunk, and Maggie had held Kara’s hair back as she’d puked and cried like it was her first time ever.

 

Maggie wonders, now, staring at the alien superhero standing in her living room, what kind of alcohol was possibly able to make the Kryptonian throw up that night.

 

But, after she was done in the bathroom, Kara had fallen asleep on top of Maggie on the couch, her head heavy on Maggie’s stomach, her hands fisted in Maggie’s t-shirt. She’d whimpered and shaken during the night, and Maggie had curled around her, rubbing her back and muttering sleepy comforts.

 

Alex had gone out and gotten them breakfast burritos in the morning and they’d all eaten them on the couch, and Maggie had said “some big sister you are, letting your freshman baby sister get shitfaced on your watch and then leaving her with _me_ all night,” but Alex had just smirked and rolled her eyes. “I think she’s officially _your_ little sister now,” she’d said, and Kara had taken a huge bite of her burrito and said something that might have been “oh, excellent,” and Maggie had felt like she belonged.

 

And now Kara is wearing a cape and tall red boots and her hair is falling, curly and perfect, around her shoulders. And her eyes look tired and her lips are pressed together, and Maggie wonders just how many more blows she can take.

 

But Kara doesn’t come out swinging. “Come here,” she says, and she sounds a little exasperated, but not angry. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

 

She gestures to the table, and she walks over and she sits, and Maggie joins her, still a little skittish. But Kara just reaches out, her powerful hands gentle and careful, and she takes the mangled dressing from Maggie’s right hand.

 

“Alex is always getting herself hurt,” Kara says softly, almost absently, “and she never takes care of it, so I had to learn how to dress human wounds.” She shakes her head a little bit, like she’s reliving a fond memory. “I swear, she’d have lost several limbs to gangrene by now if it weren’t for me.”

 

And Maggie’s pretty sure Alex would have lost more than a few toes or a hand if it weren’t for Supergirl. She’d pretty sure the entire city would be dead several times over if it weren’t for her ex-best-friend’s little sister, who once skyped Alex just to show her that she could fit nine potstickers in her mouth at once.

 

“Alex rolled her ankle,” Kara says, still focused on the dressing, like it isn’t a change of topic. “It’s just a light sprain. She’s going to be fine.”

 

Maggie nods. She hadn’t asked, but she guesses that doesn’t matter much.

 

She’s glad to know it, anyway.

 

“I heard what she said to you, in the DEO.” Kara tucks the end of the dressing into itself, and Maggie can’t help but admire how neat a job she’s done. How softly she’s touched Maggie, when her pinky finger could slam through an entire street with no effort. “She was really scared, when she realized you’d gone in, alone.”

 

“She was wrong,” Maggie says, and she realizes it’s the first thing she’s said this evening, and maybe it’s not a great start. “About why I did it, I mean. I’m not trying to punish her by getting myself killed, or something. I’m not that stupid.”

 

Kara just shakes her head. “She doesn’t think you’re stupid,” she says softly, and Maggie hates the tone she’s using. Like Maggie’s damaged, or fragile, or tender.

 

Like she’s a scared little kid, desperate to be loved.

 

“She thinks you’re reckless.”

 

And Alex Danvers liked to sit on the roofs of academic buildings and she was always the first to jump off cliffs into lakes and she had once fucked Maggie while she was driving in broad daylight. She’s never been anything but reckless.

 

And some of that must show on her face, because Kara smiles. “I know, it’s a little rich coming from her,” Kara admits. “I mean, once you’ve flown a defunct alien ship into space with absolutely no preparation or training, running on the fifteen-year-old fumes of an extinct fuel, I _do_ think your credibility when you’re calling other people reckless is a _little_ questionable.”

 

Maggie gapes. “She _what_?”

 

But Kara just shrugs. “I needed saving,” she says, like that explains it.

 

And, maybe it does.

 

“So she came and got me.”

 

And Maggie remembers that, when she had told Alex about her parents for the first time, Alex was halfway to the airport to come see her before Maggie had talked her out of it.

 

And when she’d called, crying, that she and Emily were ending, Alex had taken a red-eye across the country, skipping two days of classes, even though she was already flirting with academic probation, just to see her.

 

And when no one was going to show up to her graduation, Alex had made that ridiculous sign, just for her to see.

 

And when Rebecca had called, nine months after they’d ended and four months after Maggie had met Emily, to tell Maggie she’d tested positive for HIV, Alex had come to Maggie’s apartment, and taken her to the clinic, and sat with her during her blood test, and held her hand when the phone call came, and had let Maggie hug her for as long as she wanted when her test was negative, and she hadn’t leaned in or kissed her or asked for anything, and she’d left as soon as Emily had gotten there.

 

Just because Maggie had needed saving.

 

“I know there’s a lot of history between you and Alex,” Kara says softly. “And I don’t know the details, but I know it’s…messy.” And that’s the understatement of the century, but Maggie certainly isn’t going to out Alex to her sister, so she just nods a little bit.

 

“But the thing you need to know about Alex, is that she’s always going to come after you. Always. If you’re in danger, if she thinks she has a prayer of a chance of saving you. She’s going to try. No matter what. She couldn’t live with herself, if she didn’t.”

 

And history has not proven that to be exactly true, but Maggie says nothing.

 

Kara’s straightening up, then, and Maggie recognizes the change in her immediately. Even though she’s been wearing the cape and the S and the skirt this whole time, she’s only just now become Supergirl. Gone is the little sister that Maggie once knew, and now, sitting absurdly on one of the rickety ikea chairs at her dining room table, is an honest-to-god superhero.

 

“Which means, if you ever pull a dumb stunt like that again, you’re putting her in the line of fire. You’re forcing her to rescue you, without letting her prepare or make a plan. I need you to understand that if a bullet is coming for you, she’s going to jump in front of it. Every single time.”

 

And Maggie doesn’t know how to tell Kara that the only bullets that have ever really hurt her, since she was fourteen, have been shot from Alex’s gun.

 

But Kara is gone, and Supergirl is standing, and she’s looming, now, and her face is deadly serious. And Maggie remembers, with a small shiver, that Supergirl once threw Cat Grant off a building and she once threw an entire prison into space. That, for all that she saves kittens from trees and stops robberies, she has pulled nuclear bombs out of the air and has reached into a man’s chest and pulled out a nuclear reactor with her bare hand.

 

“So if you _ever_ put her in danger like that again, you will have me to deal with.”

 

And Maggie understands that dealing with Supergirl does not involve desk duty or a demotion.

 

Maggie nods, because putting Alex in the path of bullet has never been what she’s wanted to do. Not ever. “I understand,” she says, and her voice is a little smaller than she’d have hoped.

 

Supergirl nods back and turns to go, heading towards the windows at the back of Maggie’s apartment, not the door.

 

But then she turns back, and somehow she’s Kara again. “I don’t know what happened between you,” she says, and her voice is so much more hesitant than just a second ago, “but I know that she’s never had a friend, like she had you. Not ever.”

 

And that’s the second time Maggie’s heard that, and she still doesn’t know what to do with it.

 

So she just nods dumbly, one more time, and apparently that’s all Kara was looking for, because she hovers a few feet off the floor, and then flies out the open window.

 

And Maggie stares down at her immaculate dressing, and she goes to sit on her couch, and she closes her eyes, and she tries to think. Tries to clear the twisted haze of gut-churning desperation and self-hatred and loss that always clouds her when she thinks about Alex.

 

She falls asleep there, on the couch, remembering the times that she’d brought Alex care packages of tissues and dayquil when Alex was sick, and the time that Alex had pulled Maggie into the shower and fucked her while Maggie’s girlfriend had slept, naked and satiated, in Maggie’s bed just down the hall.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

“Kara, have you…” Alex stops herself, twisting her hands together. They’re down by the waterfront and they’re walking by the river after breakfast at Noonan’s. Kara is basking in the sun, digesting four sticky buns with a satisfied smile on her face, her eyes more than half-closed in bliss as they amble along.

 

Alex can feel her own sticky bun and coffee congealing in her stomach as she wrings her fingers together even harder.

 

“Have you – I mean…you’ve slept with your friends, right?”

 

Kara sluggishly opens her eyes just a bit more, craning her neck to look over at Alex. She makes a little sound – a sort of derisive snort – as she turns forward again, her eyelids slipping back down. “Ha ha.”

 

Alex squeezes her fingers tighter around each other. She looks down, watching with detached interest as all ten fingers start to turn white, from the beds of her nails up through her knuckles.

 

“I mean, you have, though. Right?”

 

And she means to be casual, to be breezy about it, but she clearly fails, because Kara’s opening her eyes for real now, and she’s looking over like maybe Alex’s voice was actually quite small and scared – a wet tempest instead of a comforting breeze – and she’s reaching out a hand and grasping onto Alex’s forearm.

 

Her eyes are darting down and looking at Alex’s clenched hands. Her face is doing that thing it does when she’s listening for Alex’s heartbeat.

 

“Alex,” and, fuck. Her voice is gentle and tender and soft, like Alex is fragile.

 

Alex hates to be fragile.

 

Her fingers start to tingle from her superhuman grip, the cartilage of her knuckles sliding around under each other.

 

“Hey,” Kara says softly, squeezing her arm a little. “What—what do you mean? What’s going on?”

 

It feels like the webbing between Alex’s fingers is going to rip under the pressure from her own grasp. “Just…” she closes her eyes for a second. “You just…you have, right?”

 

They aren’t walking anymore, and Kara is looking at her like she’s worried, like she’s concerned, like Alex is kind of freaking her out. But she – so kindly – gets the crinkle as she obviously thinks hard about the answer to the question. “Have I slept with my friends? Uh, I mean, sort of? Like, I was friends first with everyone I ended up dating in college? So the first time we slept together, I guess they were my friends?”

 

Well that’s not at all what Alex means. But it sort of makes it worse, because Alex has never slept with anyone that she considered a friend first.

 

Except for Maggie. And the whole point of this conversation is for what happened between her and Maggie to become normal, not to become yet anther exception to yet another rule.

 

Alex starts to bend and slip her fingers around, pressing the bases of her thumbs together as tightly as she can, sliding and twisting them up and down. It hurts, grating the tender muscles of her palm against each other, but it centers her. She won’t cry.

 

Kara, so gently, brings down the hammer. “But, uh, otherwise? No. I haven’t.”

 

Alex lets go enough to dig one thumb – _hard_ – into the soft flesh of her other palm.

 

And Kara is getting better at being a reporter, because she skips through a lot of the other questions and, with Cat Grant-like accuracy, asks just the one dagger.

 

“Why did you hope that I had?”

 

Alex breathes out through her nose, focusing on the feeling of her thumb nail driving hard into her palm. On cataloguing the names of all of the muscles and bones she’s pulling to their limits.

 

“I just…I just thought it was something everyone did.” _Lumbricalis_.

 

Kara tilts her head a little bit. They’re still standing but now Kara takes a few steps to her right and sinks onto a bench.

 

Alex stays standing.

 

_Dorsal interossei._

 

“Why did – what made you think that?”

 

Alex concentrates on pressing the first knuckle of all of her fingers together, letting bone grate painfully on bone.

 

“It—it just…Vicky said…she said it wasn’t a big…that it was normal to…” She can’t quite finish the sentence, but Kara’s eyebrows shoot up anyway.

 

“Vicky? Vicky Donohue? From high school?”

 

 _Proximal phalange_.

 

Alex nods, and it’s a little jerky, and she presses her palms into each other, rubbing them back and forth until she finds the tight knots in the muscle again. She lingers there, pushing hard, focusing on the pain.

 

“So you’ve…” Kara is clearly picking her words carefully now, like she’s worried. _Capitate bone_. “You’ve thought that everyone sleeps with their friends since you were in high school?”

 

 _Flexor pollicis brevis_.

 

“I mean, not…I just…” Alex lets out a breath and she hates that it shudders. “She said just when boys weren’t around.”

 

And she hears it – she hears that it’s stupid, when she says it out loud. Hears that Kara had only said yes about _boys,_ all of whom she ended up dating. Hears that it doesn’t make sense, because the friend she’d slept with was _gay_ , and other girls were always around.

 

She squeezes her hands together until she can feel the delicate bones shifting under her fingers.

 

 _Metacarpel_.

 

“Did you sleep with Vicky?” Kara asks softly, her voice so tender and cautious that Alex wants to rip her own thumbs clean off.

 

Because Vicky is a _girl_ and because Alex is vulnerable and because the truth is so much worse than that.

 

 _Opponens digiti minimi_.

 

Alex digs the nails of two of her fingers into her opposite thumb, pressing as hard as she possibly can.

 

She won’t cry.

 

“No,” she says, and it’s more like a whisper than a word and she hates it. She presses harder, enough to leave a lasting mark.

 

_Pisiform._

 

She takes the beat of silence Kara gives her, and the word comes out of her mouth. It’s choked and tight and high and it sounds like she’s going to cry, but she _isn’t_.

 

“Maggie,” she admits out loud for only the second time in her entire life. “It – Maggie.”

 

“Oh,” Kara breathes, her cheeks puffing out with it. “Oh,” she says again, and Alex can see it all falling into place for Kara. Their fights in the DEO. The way Alex had abruptly stopped mentioning her, so long ago. Alex’s anger and fear at seeing her on the tarmac.

 

Alex’s horrible terror when the report had come in that Maggie was under fire, alone, in that warehouse.

 

_Adductor pollicis._

 

“Okay,” Kara says, and her voice is measured now, like she’s trying to calm Alex down. “Okay, well, I mean, experimenting, one time, doesn’t really mean anything. It doesn’t mean you’re…” she trails off, and Alex doesn’t know if it’s because she doesn’t know which word to use or because she’s disgusted by the idea.

 

Disappointed by the idea.

 

Alex freezes for a moment. Kara’s giving her an out, right now, with this experimenting thing. She should stop there, let Kara think it was just once – maybe drunk, maybe in high school – just one random anomaly in an otherwise perfectly heterosexual life.

  
But she can’t help herself. The truth rushes out of her, hot and painful. “It wasn’t just one time.”

 

She curls her fingers back into her palms, gripping as tightly as she can.

 

“Oh.” Kara’s the one trying to keep it casual now, but she’s failing spectacularly. “How – how many…?”

 

Alex’s mind tries to flick through the math. Two straight weeks that second summer at camp. Two full years at Stanford. That one horrible night in Gotham. And Alex is a genius and excels in math but she can’t quite figure it out. “I, um…”

 

She feels the gristle of her fingers grinding against her bones. _Hamate bone_.

 

“Two years,” she finally says, and that isn’t even the whole truth, but it probably sets the scope pretty well. “We…more than two years.”

 

Kara blinks a couple times, but the sun is shining on her and it’s a little hard to see her eyes through the glare on her glasses. “Oh,” she says again, reaching up to fiddle with her frames like she always does when she doesn’t know what to say. “So, are you…is this you coming out to me?”

 

And the word flies out of Alex’s mouth before she can even think. “No!” She finally lets go of her hands, wrapping her arms around her waist and clenching her fists in the fabric of her jacket. She hopes it doesn’t rip under her grip. “I’m not…no.”

 

“Alex,” Kara says, and her voice is still loving but it’s stronger now. Firmer. “It’s okay, you can tell me. So you’re gay, or bi or something. It’s not a big deal.”

 

The denial flings itself out of Alex, propelled at the speed of light. “I’m **_not_**.”

 

Kara stands, reaching out for Alex’s shoulder but Alex shakes her off before she even lands. “Alex, look, I know it’s not up to me, here. But, I just…” She takes a deep breath and then her crinkle smooths out, and suddenly there’s something very Supergirl-ish about her. “You asked me if I’ve ever slept with my friends, and I haven’t. I think most women who are actually straight haven’t spent two years sleeping with their female friends.”

 

Alex holds herself even tighter.

 

“Vicky was wrong,” Kara says simply. “You’re my sister and I love you, Alex. But that’s not…I haven’t ever done that. No matter who was or wasn’t around.”

 

And it’s all Alex can do to turn and walk away, her head bowed, her fingernails nearly tearing through her jacket.

 

* * *

 

Kara is wrong.

 

Alex throws another punch.

 

It’s night, and Alex has tried whiskey and it hasn’t helped. She’s tried shooting things and it hasn’t helped. So now she’s here, in the DEO’s workout room, still a little drunk and now completely sweaty and teetering somewhere on the edge between exhaustion and panic.

 

Kara is wrong.

 

Uppercut.

 

Kara doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.

 

Jab.

 

Just because Alex slept with Maggie a couple times in college, that doesn’t mean anything.

 

Right cross.

 

It’s college. Everyone experiments in college. Everyone does dumb stuff in college.

 

Left hook.

 

An image – a memory – floats through her brain. An image of Maggie, just seventeen, flat on her back in that twin bed at camp. It was late and she was naked, chest heaving, covered in sweat, her hair long and tangled on the pillow underneath her. Grinning.

 

Alex punches the bag four times, as fast and as hard as she can.

 

It was…that was just…new, Alex tells herself. She was just trying something out. She was young and getting to know her body, that’s all. It was just practice.

 

Right cross.

 

The Maggie in her mind shifts. Still seventeen, still in that dorm room at camp. But it was daytime and she was wearing sweatpants and one of Alex’s shirts and her hair was up in a bun. She was sitting cross legged in her desk chair, frowning down at the textbook on her desk. Her lip was between her teeth as she fought with the numbers in front of her. Alex remembers walking up behind her, wrapping her arms around Maggie’s chest, pressing kisses to the back of her head, to her neck. She remembers Maggie tipping her head back, letting it rest on Alex’s body. Alex remembers the feeling in her chest, like she was going to explode, like she was swelling with happiness. _This is fucking impossible_ , she remembers Maggie whining, her beautiful eyes closed, her long neck on display as she craned back into Alex. _You’re beautiful_ , Alex remembers saying.

 

Alex slams into the bag, furious and desperate, punching as hard as she can to try to forget what happened next. But she remembers. She remembers sliding into the chair behind Maggie, looking down at the page and helping Maggie through the problem set, her hands running up and down Maggie’s waist, leaving long, terribly soft kisses on Maggie’s neck whenever she wants to.

 

Uppercut. Uppercut. Uppercut.

 

It didn’t mean anything. It _doesn’t_ mean anything.

 

Jab.

 

Right hook.

 

The scene in her mind shifts. They’re older, this time. It’s fall at Stanford, and Alex has just left a frat party with some guy. Josh, she thinks, although she wasn’t even sure at the time. She followed him to his dorm room, letting him urge her to her knees as soon as she’d crossed the threshold. She went down on him, the lights still on, still fully dressed. She hated how he tasted in her mouth, how his hands felt in her hair – just hated all of it. She did everything she’d ever read about or done to make it end as quickly as possible, and she left the second he finished. She didn’t let him touch her back.

 

Overhand.

 

Jab.

 

She showered and brushed her teeth and then, without hesitation, went to Maggie’s room. She dropped to her knees, without a word, and simply took Maggie. She relished the taste of Maggie in her mouth and, years later, in this stifling workout room, she can still perfectly remember it. She sighed a little in relief as Maggie gripped her head, her fingers scratching at the base of Alex’s neck as her own head thudded back against her door. Alex drew it out for as long as she could. Stayed mindless for as long as she could.

 

Once Maggie was finally satisfied, Alex let Maggie pull her into the bed and touch her for hours.

 

She left, sometime in the middle of the night, because Maggie’s girlfriend could have come by in the morning.

 

Uppercut.

 

Left hook.

 

Even though her eyes are closed, she can perfectly picture how Maggie pressed Emily up against a wall, kissing her hungrily, at another party, a year later. Alex remembers the sick feeling in her stomach, like maybe she was going to cry or maybe she was going to have a light heart attack. She remembers drinking more than she should have. She remembers what Maggie’s hands looked like, splayed out on Emily’s ass. She remembers the horrible constriction of her chest.

 

She remembers the boy she went home with that night, someone from her lab. She hated how he sounded, how he wanted, how he pulled her too tight and sweat too much and kept trying to get her to come.

 

Alex reaches out with both hands and smacks the bag, hard, with her palms. She pushes it, as strongly as she can, away from herself. She punches it as it comes swinging back, wondering if she’s going to break her hand.

 

Jab.

 

Hook.

 

And she’s not sure if it’s sweat or if she’s crying, but she feels something inside of her break as she remembers that night in Gotham. How Maggie looked in that enormous hotel bed, naked, chest heaving, splayed out, sweaty, and slowly transforming from blissed out to horrified. How Maggie had tasted, just minutes before. How she had sounded, just minutes before.

 

How Maggie gathered up her clothes, getting dressed while spitting out the harshest words she’d ever said.

 

How she went back to Emily, sweaty and sated and hating Alex.

 

How Alex wanted her stay.

 

* * *

 

She’s not drunk anymore and she’s not sweaty anymore.

 

It’s been days.

 

But she’s still remembering. Has been remembering for almost a week now. Moments and fragments and flashes – out of order and all jumbled up. But they come together to make a horrifyingly clear picture.

 

She remembers how she faked it with Kyle Madden, only putting up with him because Vicky would pull Alex into her bed to get all the details afterwards.

 

She remembers that she called Maggie over and over that year, and that Maggie never once answered.

 

She remembers how Maggie looked in the darkness of her living room in Gotham, just the one lamp on, as they skyped after Maggie graduated from Stanford. Maggie was so tired – she stayed up late just to talk to Alex because of the time difference – but her grin was real. Alex could see her dimples through the screen, even in the dim grainy light, as Alex told her about being accepted to her first peer reviewed journal.

 

She remembers the little sound Maggie made – surprised and joyful and completely startled into happiness – the very first time, that second year at camp, that Alex reached out and caught her arm and tugged her in and cupped her face and kissed her.

 

And in the harsh bright light of her memory, Alex knows that she did it – kissed her – just because she wanted to. Because Maggie was beautiful and smart and tough and because holding hands and cuddling and late night conversations from their separate twin beds weren’t cutting it anymore. Because Alex needed to have her hands on Maggie; to have her mouth on Maggie. Because without kissing her, without touching her, Alex would have, quite simply, died.

 

And Alex knows now that it never – not then and not since – had anything to do with any boy who wasn’t around. With any girl who wasn’t around. That Alex just wanted – _needed_ – Maggie.

 

And Alex, with a horrible ache, can't stop remembering how sometimes, after Maggie and Emily had a fight, Maggie would show up in Alex’s room. And Alex always put on a movie carefully selected to not trigger Maggie – nothing with loving parents, or happy children, or one particular type of childhood trauma.  Maggie always held herself so stiffly at the beginning of the movie – _Terminator_ or _Saw_ or the new _Batman_ movie or whatever – sitting on the corner of Alex’s bed like she was in a military parade.

 

But just about half an hour in, without fail, Maggie always melted into her side, curling into the warmth and comfort of Alex’s body. And, on special nights, Alex pressed a kiss on the top of Maggie’s head. On those nights, Alex whispered _I love you_ into Maggie's hair, and Maggie – solemn, closed off, emotionally unavailable Maggie – always, _always_ , murmured it back.

 

Alex remembers how impossibly beautiful Maggie looked in her dorm room senior year, tugging self-consciously at the blazer she’d bought for the winter ball Emily was dying to go to. Alex stood so close to fasten one of her own necklaces around Maggie’s neck. She can still remember how Maggie’s hair smelled. How gorgeous and pretty and handsome Maggie was that night.

 

She can't stop remembering how Maggie's eyes lit up when Emily knocked on her door.

 

Alex slunk out of the room, her lungs too small for her body. She drank, that night, alone in her lab, in gross violation of safety protocol. It was the first time she let whatever was happening between her and Maggie – whatever was happening inside herself – affect her schoolwork.

 

Alex isn’t drunk anymore, but she still can’t remember their first _I love you_. She’s never been able to. It was sometime the year between camps, said casually on the phone or by email or maybe on AIM.

 

She’s not drunk anymore but she hates how the first _I love you_ is lost to the years while the last one is burned into her brain.

 

She remembers how Maggie looked when Alex said it, what turned out to be that last time. Maggie was so raw and afraid and adrift, in that hotel room in Gotham, even hours before the unforgivable happened between them. She was so afraid of the impending breakup, so afraid of losing Emily, of losing the life she’d built with Emily. _Maybe I’m unloveable_ , she whispered, staring down into her hands, nearly trembling with the fear of it. Alex shook her head, hard. **_I_** _love you_ , she said, refuting Maggie’s hypothesis as clearly as she can. _You’re not unloveable, because_ **_I_** _love you_. And she remembers how Maggie looked at her like she was magic. Like she was impossible. Like she was more than Maggie could have ever imagined. _I love you too_ , Maggie said back, and her voice was a little tight, and she was looking right into Alex's eyes and they were both swallowing back tears.

 

And Alex remembers how, not three hours later, Maggie gathered up her clothes and said _you ruined my life_ and _I hate you_ and _you’re a fucking monster_.

 

Alex remembers it all.

 

* * *

 

Alex remembers it all, and none of it was because boys weren’t around.

 

All of it was because of Maggie. Because Maggie has always been electric and magnetic and strong and beautiful and smart and Alex has never, not for a minute, done anything but want her.

 

And she’s not drunk anymore and her hands are sore but not broken and she remembers it all, so she reaches up and knocks on Kara’s door.

 

And Kara invites her to sit on the couch, and Kara offers her popcorn, but Alex just shakes her head.

 

“Kara, I think I’m…” she looks down, but she presses her palms flat on her thighs. “I think you were right, about me.”

 

And Kara – sweet, kind, gentle Kara – seems to have been thinking about it too. Because this time she’s not awkward and she’s not putting words in Alex’s mouth and she’s not pressing and she’s not disappointed or disgusted.

 

“I love you,” Kara’s careful to say. “I would never be disappointed in you,” she says.

 

“I’m proud of you,” she says.

 

And Alex lets Kara hug her and she closes her eyes for a second and something deep inside her heart unlocks with a little click.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience, my friends.
> 
> This chapter became unwieldy, so it's been split into two shorter ones. The second will be up in the next few days.

A couple weeks into her tenure as a DEO agent, Alex had cut off her hair. She’d had hair down below her shoulders since she was six years old. She’d never been the type of kid to mess around with her hair much; she’d always just liked it long, and straight, and simple. She’d experimented with bangs, like everyone, but otherwise, it had just always been there. Just normal, straight, long, white-girl hair.

 

By the time she was on academic probation, by the time she’d come back from Gotham and started to teeter from _struggling_ to _failing_ , it had gotten longer than ever. It had flowed down to her mid-back, sometimes smoothly and sometimes in tangle of old hairspray and sleepless nights.

 

And then, a couple weeks into her time in the cave of the dessert base, a couple weeks after she’d started training on the mats, she’d cut it all off. She’d thought of it, privately, as _Doing The Mulan_. She hadn’t had a sword close to hand, so she’d used her tactical knife, but she’d figured the sentiment still counted.

 

She’d cut it all off, leaving herself with a rough chin-length bob. And it had been messy – there’s a reason professional stylists don’t use tactical knives – but it had done the job. It had gotten the message across to J’onn (well, Hank) and to the other agents and to the other recruits: Alex Danvers was not some dumb party bitch. She was here to kick ass, to take names, and to beat the living shit out of each and every one of them, on and off the mats. In and out of the labs.

 

All of that, she’d meant. But it had also, surprisingly, sent a message to herself. She’d spent days – weeks – in staring at herself in the mirror. Not in admiration, but in wonder. Had this woman really been inside of her all this time? This woman, with the severe hair and the dangerous eyes? This woman, with the tactical vest and the knives and the guns? This woman, with the impassive face and the rough, harsh hair, and the bark in her voice?

 

She’d stared and she’d looked and she’d barely recognized herself.

 

It’s the same now.

 

It’s been weeks since Kara’s apartment, since she’d realized – admitted – that she’d always wanted Maggie in a way that was more real, more serious, and more meaningful than how she’d wanted anything else in the world, ever. It’s been weeks, and she can’t stop staring at herself.

 

She can’t believe that this woman has been inside of her the whole time. This woman with the fear, and the need. This woman, who loved so hard that it blinded her. This woman with the terrible, sharp, eviscerating _want_.

 

Alex has never seen her before.

 

* * *

 

It’s a weird feeling, she decides, being entirely sure of something for the first time in your life, but having that surety be the thing that dislodges everything else you’ve ever believed to be true.

 

For the first time in her life, she’s sure about one thing. About Maggie. About what she’d wanted from Maggie, about how she’d felt, about why she’d done it all.

 

But that one tiny kernel of truth – that one small pin in the map of her life – has thrown the rest into a cascade of chaos. What does _Maggie_ – a word that now means not just the person but also Alex’s entire set of desires for her – mean about Vicky? About Kyle? About Alex?

 

It’s infuriating because now she can plot _Maggie_ on the graph of her life, but all the other points are moving around like Alex has had three drinks too many and she can’t quite focus her eyes clearly. She wants to write it down, to chart it out, to run the equation and to figure out an answer. But there are no words, and there are too many variables, and you can’t draw a line without two points.

 

_Maggie_ is one point, one fixed truth, now. But Alex is desperately grasping around and she can’t find even a second point.

 

Is she gay? Bisexual? Straight except for Maggie? _Maggie_ is clear, but men are a question mark. Other women are a question mark.

 

Alex can’t create the graph, she can’t figure it out. And it’s tearing her apart.

 

Without knowing if she’s gay, she can’t properly figure out the rest of her past. Or her future. She can’t tell her mom. She can’t name it to Kara. She can’t picture a life for herself. She can’t look in the mirror and see anything but a black hole of uncertainty that threatens to drag her under at any second.

 

She had loved Maggie. Hard. But knowing that just isn’t enough. Not yet.

 

* * *

 

Six weeks after her confession to Kara, and approximately a million google searches later, a DEO agent walks into a bar.

 

She walks into Dot’s because google said it’s a gay bar and tonight is lady’s night, which google says is for lesbians and queer women, which google says are two overlapping but distinct groups of people. She’s not wearing her old clubbing clothes, but instead black skinny jeans and heels and a fitted men’s suit vest over a lacy bra, because google said that was a look that queer women would like.

 

She orders a whiskey straight because google says that’s okay and it’s her favorite drink and it calms her. She tries to relax her face because google and Kara both say that looking angry isn’t going to get women to approach her.

 

But maybe she didn’t need to do _so_ much googling because women approach her all night. The vest seems to really be working on them. They buy her drinks and offer her a few dances. They hold her hand, and when she distangles after a dance, two of them kiss her on the cheek and offer her another whenever.

 

She goes back to one after a while – a tall blonde with ample cleavage and short hair that’s longer on one side than the other. She has tattoos on her arms and she’s wearing a tank top and she doesn’t have defined muscles but her hold on Alex is just as tight as she’d like it to be. The woman, Jessie, is soft and beautiful and very extremely gay.

 

Jessie kisses Alex during a Beyoncé song, and Alex kisses her back.

 

Alex doesn’t go home with her, but they make out for a few more songs before Jessie leaves with her friends. She invites Alex to join them for late night pizza, but she declines. Jessie leaves her with one last kiss – hot and wet and full of everything they both know they aren’t going to satisfy together – and Alex feels it down to her toes.

 

Alex goes home and she showers and she plots another point on her chart. She draws the line between them, and she feels some of the horrible weight of confusion slip off her shoulders.

 

It’s Maggie, yeah, but it’s not _just_ Maggie.

 

It’s women.

 

* * *

 

It’s not men.

 

She goes to another bar on another night in another outfit, and she gets a lot of attention from men. She dances to a lot of songs with a couple of them, but there are no men she wants to go back to. None of them make her feel like Jessie did, like she was floating. Like she was a god. She doesn’t want to see what’s under any of their clothes, or to learn what their tongues taste like.

 

She goes home alone, unkissed, and she leans against her front door and nearly buckles with relief at her third data point.

 

She can finally make a conclusion.

 

It’s Maggie, yeah, and it’s women, and it’s not men.

 

* * *

 

She writes her conclusion in a text and she sends it to Kara, even though it’s the middle of the night and Kara is nothing but a girl scout.

 

_I’m gay._

 

* * *

 

Even though Kara’s on a tight deadline at CatCo, she brings Alex her favorite croissant from that one bakery in Paris right around her 10am slump.

 

* * *

 

Alex hasn’t seen Maggie since the raid. Kara’s reported in about how Maggie’s healing, about her desk job at NCPD seems to be going, based on how often she hears Maggie griping when she’s out and about on Supergirl duties.

 

(Neither of them mentions why Kara’s started listening out for Maggie’s voice the way she always listens out for Alex’s).

 

So today, about three weeks after the text message, Alex can’t help but stop short as she walks into the control room. There are a bunch of rookies behind her, and they stagger into each other at her abrupt stop, each of them more terrified of lightly brushing up against her by accident than they are of body slamming into each other.

 

Today Alex stops short at the end of the hallway because Maggie is in the control room, leaning over an agent to look at what he’s showing her on his display. And she’s not dirty or bloody or wounded, and she’s standing straight, and her hair is loose and flowing.

 

And it’s not just the first time Alex has seen her since she’s plotted the data points. Not just the first time since Alex has realized that she’s gay.

 

It’s the first time Alex has seen her since realizing that, all those years ago, Alex had wanted her. That Alex had, in the same breaths and the same moments and the same kisses, loved her and wanted her and wanted to be touching her and wanted to be with her like her girlfriends were.

 

She stands, slightly dumbstruck at the end of the hallway, because she hadn’t expected it to feel so different. She’s known Maggie since she was sixteen. She’s known what’s underneath Maggie’s pants since she was seventeen, but, still. Right this minute, hovering uselessly at the end of the hallway, with a crowd of confused rookies bottled up behind her, Alex can’t tear her eyes away from Maggie. From her legs and her butt in those pants as she leans forward towards the display. From her slender hand as she gestures towards what she’s seeing. From her hair, starting to fall over to one side.

 

From the flicker of genuine fear that crosses her face when she turns around and catches sight of Alex.

 

* * *

 

It’s the flicker of fear that drives Alex out of the DEO, even though it’s only two in the afternoon and she hasn’t been going home until ten or eleven at night recently.

 

She’d known, before this afternoon, that Maggie hates her. Maggie hates her.

 

Maggie had said it, after the raid. Or, well, Alex had said it, had said “You hate me that fucking much?” and Maggie hadn’t said anything back. Hadn’t said _no, I don’t hate you_. Hadn’t even said _it’s complicated_. Hadn’t said _are you okay_. Hadn’t said _thank you for saving my life_. Hadn’t said _I’m sorry you almost lost yours, and Kara’s and Jacobson’s_.

 

And Maggie had said it that night in Gotham. Had said “I hate you,” and had said “I never want to see you again,” and “you’ve never done anything but fuck up my life,” and “you’ve ruined my fucking life over and over again.”

 

That night, she had said “I hate you,” four times. Alex remembers each one.

 

The revelation here isn’t that Maggie hates her. That’s a given.

 

And now Alex knows that she loved Maggie. Maybe does still, in some way.

 

But she’d never thought that Maggie would be _afraid_ of her.

 

Maggie is strong and tough and didn’t give a fucking shit that they all almost died saving her. Maggie wasn’t afraid to go into that warehouse alone. Maggie wasn’t afraid that night in Gotham, when everything had cracked apart. She was furious – she hated – but she wasn’t afraid.

 

But Alex had been terrified.

 

In the warehouse and in Gotham, Alex had been terrified of losing Maggie. Terrified that none of the fucking shambles of her life would still have any meaning if the huge cracks swallowed up her best friend. If the huge guns eviscerated the one person who’d ever been hers.

 

The hate is old, but the fear is new.

 

The fear is what drives Alex to the bar, even though it’s only two in the afternoon.

 

And the fear is why Lucy finds her there at four in the afternoon, off her face.

 

* * *

 

“She’s scared of me.”

 

Lucy shrugs, almost smiling. “And? You love it when people are scared of you.”

 

Alex shakes her head, foggy with drink. “I love it when rookies are scared of me,” she corrects. “And Maxwell Lord.”

 

Lucy sniggers.

 

“Not Maggie. I never…she was my _life_ , Lucy. Do you know what it’s like for someone who’s your _life_ to look at you and be afraid?”

 

Neither of them mentions that, back before they were friends, Lucy had looked at Alex and J’onn and been afraid, and had sent them both off to die.

 

That once Kara had been drugged and had thrown people off a building and broken Alex’s arm and Alex had been terrified.

 

That once Alex had brandished a sword at Kara and threatened to run her through.

 

“I…” Her voice catches and she should care but she’s off her face and it’s still the afternoon so she just can’t. “It’s so awful, Luce.”

 

And Alex has never told Lucy the whole thing, not all the feelings she’s only just realized she always had, but Lucy seems to know it anyway. Alex is almost sobbing but Lucy doesn’t let her off the hook. She puts a comforting hand on Alex’s, softly, but she keeps talking.

 

“You hurt her, babe.”

 

Alex blinks, frustrated. “I didn’t _mean_ to.”

 

“Yeah, I know. But, real talk here?” She leans forward, right into Alex’s space, but not in an aggressive way. “That doesn’t mean shit, and you know it.”

 

Alex swallows. “She hurt me too.”

 

Lucy’s voice is soft. “I know.”

 

“I just…I want…” She trails off, but Lucy nudges her.

 

“What, Danvers? What do you want?”

 

“I want to go back in time and just…change everything.”

 

Lucy is implacable. “But you can’t. There’s no time travel coming, Alex. So what do you want now? In the present?”

 

Alex lets out a breath and it makes her whole body shudder. “I want her,” she manages. “Not scared, and not bleeding, and not…not hating me.”

 

Lucy gives her a moment, and Alex is nearly dead drunk, but she still manages to find the truth. “I want her.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading and being the best imaginary friends in the world.
> 
> Come visit me on my tumblr (performativezippers) and twitter (p_zippers) to learn useless things about my life, read my rants, and support my other work. Heart you.


	7. Chapter 7

Alex knocks on the door. Two, maybe three times. Four? Her hand feels a little heavy, which is odd because her head feels a little light.

 

It’s been weeks since she’s seen Maggie, and it’s been hours since she’s eaten, and only minutes since that grumpy bartender had cut her off. Only a handful of minutes since that man had bought her the four shots she asked for and then she’d told him to fuck off. Only a handful of minutes since he’d laid a hand on her, pissed, and she’d flipped him over her shoulder without a hint of effort.

 

The bartender had cut her off and kicked the man out, but Alex had left too.

 

And now she’s here. Knocking. Twice, or possibly four times.

 

She’s not sure how long it is, but eventually the door opens.

 

“Maggie,” Alex breathes out, somewhat surprised to see her, although, of course, this is Maggie’s apartment.

 

“Alex.” Maggie’s face is blank and Alex has to squint a little to make sure she’s real. Breathing and blinking. Alive. “What are you doing here?”

 

“I had to see you.” It’s a blurt, but it’s true.

 

But it isn’t until Maggie recoils – actually, physically, recoils – that Alex recognizes those words for what they were. What they used to be.

 

It’s what she’d said, sometimes, back at Stanford. When she’d knock on Maggie’s dorm room door, and Maggie would slip out, closing the door softly behind herself so she wouldn’t wake up the girl sleeping inside. “What are you doing here?” She would whisper, and Alex would sometimes say it. “I had to see you,” she’d whisper sometimes, her voice hoarse with what she’d told herself was nothing.

 

And when she’d gotten off that plane in Gotham and Maggie had met her airport, Alex had said it. “I had to see you,” she’d said, her hands cupping Maggie’s face. Seeing her in person for the first time in years. Something that she thought was loneliness and nostalgia making her tender and raw. “I had to see you,” she’d said again, pulling Maggie into herself, holding her for a long, shuddering moment.

 

But tonight it’s different. Tonight Alex is an adult and she’s gay and she knows why she has to see Maggie.

 

“No, I mean…no. I mean, yes. I had to, but not…not like that.”

 

Maggie still hasn’t let her into the apartment, and she’s tilting her head in confusion, and she’s looking Alex up and down like Alex is a bomb that could go off at any second.

 

“You’re drunk,” she finally says, and she’s looking at Alex like that’s a horrible thing to be.

 

“No. No, not drunk. Just…a little…something. Not drunk.”

 

But Maggie shakes her head. “You’re drunk.” Her voice is firm. “Call an uber. Go home.”

 

She starts to close the door but Alex flings her arm up, smacking the door loudly with her palm. “Wait! No, Maggie. You don’t understand. I have to…I have to tell you.”

 

Maggie isn’t really fighting her but she’s keeping up her pressure on the door. “Go home Alex. Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.”

 

“I love you.”

 

They both stop, cold. Alex wonders who said it for a long second before she realizes it was her. Maggie is frozen, like an exquisite work of marble.

 

Alex didn’t mean to say it. At best, she meant to say, _I loved you_. Past tense. But it came out in the present, and Alex finds herself – head light and hands heavy, squinting in the harsh hallway lights – unwilling and unable to take it back.

 

So she says it again. “I love you.”

 

Something heavy and horrible, something disgusting and festered, lifts itself out of the deepest cavity of her body. She finds herself light and clean, pure and whole, like when she was seventeen, holding Maggie’s hand during camp orientation just because she’d missed her all year. Before anything went to shit.

 

She wonders if it will happen again. “I love you,” she says again, and it’s like her blood – slow and sluggish and heavy with toxic metals – is turning into seltzer. Bright and bubbly and alight.

 

But it isn’t until Maggie says “Stop,” in her firmest voice that Alex realizes she’s been talking this whole time, too. She’s been saying, “Stop,” this whole time.

 

“Alex, stop. Stop saying that. Stop talking.” Alex’s head is light and her blood has been replaced with champagne so she can’t really tell, but it looks like maybe Maggie is trying not to cry.

 

“Go home, Alex.”

 

Alex flounders. She’s too light, she’s flopping all over the place. She can’t feel the ground under her feet. She’s floating up, but not in a good way. “Maggie, didn’t you hear—”

 

But Maggie stops her, holding up her hand, her face nothing but agony. “I heard. You’re drunk. It’s late, and you’re drunk, and I’d thought you’d outgrown this, but I guess not.”

 

Alex is gasping for air. She can’t breathe all the way up here. “What are you talking about?”

 

She had thought that Maggie used to love her, used to want to be her best friend always, but the person speaking to her right now is nothing but hard edges and disgust. “You don’t get to do this to me anymore, Alex. You don’t get to come around, drunk and horny, and get invited into my life. Never again.” She shifts, and Alex realizes two seconds too late that Maggie is closing the door. “Go home, Alex. Sleep it off.”

 

She closes the door, and Alex hears the sound of several locks.

 

She sinks down to the floor, hoping that gravity will keep her there, even though she’s so light that she can’t feel her body. Can’t feel her heart, or her lungs, or her hands.

 

She tries to breathe and forces herself to blink and wonders if she’s disintegrating.

 

She faintly makes out the sound of Maggie making a quick phone call, but then all is silent until Kara shows up with a signature whoosh.

 

Kara scoops her up and carries her home and puts her to bed, and Alex doesn’t realize until the next day that she’d cried all the way home.

 

She’d flown home, up in the sky, held tight by her sister, and all she’d wanted to be was down on the ground. She’d floated and it had been horrible.

 

* * *

 

She’s not stupid. She understands what happened. She went over to Maggie’s after midnight, drunk and wanting. Maggie doesn’t know about everything Alex has realized, these last few months. Maggie thought it was a backslide. She hadn’t known Alex was asking for something different. Something new. Something real.

 

What Maggie said and did hurt, but Alex isn’t stupid. She understands patterns.

 

So she showers and gets dressed and brushes her teeth and combs her hair and she puts on jeans and a sweater, and she stops on her way to pick up coffee and those muffins that Kara says Maggie likes.

 

It’s morning, and the sun is shining, and Alex is stone cold sober, and she’s going to Maggie’s apartment to tell her the truth. To say _I’m gay_ , and _it was always you_ , and _I’m ready now_ , and _I promise I won’t hurt you again_.

 

She goes, and she knocks three times, and Maggie opens the door.

 

Alex offers her the coffee and the muffins, and Maggie hesitates but lets her inside.

 

Alex says it in a rush. “I’m sorry about last night,” she says. “I didn’t mean for it to happen like that. But I meant what I said.”

 

Maggie says nothing. They’re still standing.

 

“I realized some things about myself. Well, sort of one thing. One big thing that means a lot of little things.” She takes a breath and then she says it. It’s sunny in Maggie’s apartment and it’s morning and Maggie is wearing an NCPD tshirt and everything happening feels entirely strange. “I realized that I’m gay. A…a lesbian. And I hadn’t known, before, but now I do.”

 

Maggie doesn’t say anything. She’s perfectly still – she’s stopped playing with the lid of her coffee cup – but silent.

 

“And I hadn’t understood it before, because I was stupid, but I loved you, then. I was in love with you, then.”

 

It’s monstrously quiet.

 

Maggie doesn’t gasp or take in a sharp breath or drop something or take a step.

 

She’s looking at Alex but not intently. She isn’t blinking, but not from focus or intensity. She’s there but she’s blank.

 

Alex takes a breath and feels the ground beneath her feet and remembers what it had been like last night. “I think I still do.” A long pause. “I mean, I know it. I know I still do. That’s why I was so upset after the warehouse.”

 

She takes the steps, walking up into Maggie’s body, reaching out and gently cupping Maggie’s face. She looks tired and a little sad; for once, she looks her actual age instead of years younger. Alex rubs her thumbs up and down Maggie’s cheeks, letting herself look. Letting herself sink into the softness of Maggie’s body, into the softness of her feelings, in ways that she hasn’t since camp when she was seventeen. “I was so scared to lose you,” she whispers, her voice thick with it, “Because I love you.”

 

Maggie isn’t moving, but Alex can feel tears start to well up in her own eyes. “I’m sorry, Maggie. I’m sorry for not realizing it sooner, for hurting you. For Gotham. I’m…I’m so sorry, but I’m here now. We can make this work, now.”

 

But Maggie is shaking her head, and she’s pulling backwards, peeling herself away from Alex.

 

“No,” she’s saying, and it takes ages for the word to permeate into Alex’s brain.

 

“No, Alex.”

 

Alex reaches out, clasping her wrist softly. “I know, I know I hurt you. I know. I have so much to make up for, Mags, I know—”

 

But Maggie is shaking her off, and she’s not furious exactly, but she’s somewhere near pissed. “Alex, no. You didn’t actually ask a question, but my answer is no.”

 

Alex blinks. Two, maybe four times. “But I’m…”

 

But Maggie shakes her head. “I heard you,” she says. “And I’m…I’m glad that you’re figuring yourself out. God knows, it’s about time. But me…no, Alex.”

 

She holds up her hands, warding off any future attempt for Alex to touch her. “I’m out. I’m not in this with you. Not anymore.”

 

There’s a long pause, and then she says it. “I don’t want to be with you. No matter what.”

 

Alex pulls her tears back in, forcing them to absorb back into her eyeballs with military discipline. “Oh,” she says, wrestling herself back under control. She finds herself standing at attention, using the clipped tone she’d learned the cavernous belly of the DEO.

 

She nods once, regulation, and then steps back. “Understood.”

 

She turns and retreats, and they both politely pretend her voice didn’t crack.

 

* * *

 

Maggie pours the coffee down the sink. She puts the muffin in her compost bin. She methodically texts Kara for what she hopes is the last time, telling her to keep an eye on Alex.

 

She goes for a run and pushes herself until she’s limping home, relatively sure she’s done irreparable damage to her healing body.

 

She showers under frigid water and screams into a pillow until she’s hoarse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading and being the best imaginary friends in the world.
> 
> Come visit me on my tumblr (performativezippers) and twitter (p_zippers) to learn useless things about my life, read my rants, and support my other work. Heart you.


End file.
